ACTA is the biggest threat to modern life at the moment. The American government has sold every ones internet freedom to the film and music industry, and not only the freedom of those in america, but in fact everyone worldwide. We must fight to save OUR internet now, before it is too late. ACTA is the destruction of everything we have worked for in the last 20 years, where would we be now if the internet had never existed?
What is ACTA/SOPA?
ACTA is a worldwide agreement that allows governments to censor our internet.. It is supposed to support film and music industries by reducing piracy. ACTA messes with the way that the internet works, it will essentially be the end of the internet as we know it.
SOPA was a bill that has been delayed for now, with similar intentions. This was due to be passed in america only, but it would essentially allow the american goverment to deport people to america in order to have them charged. SOPA is regarded as the distraction against ACTA, so that it could pass behind our backs without us realising.
Imagine you pay for a cookery book, you can legally recreate all the recipes inside of it. Now, you have cooked a meal out of your book and friend wants to recreate the same meal using the recipe, you tell him the recipe right? With ACTA, then no, that would be illegal. You would be sharing information that only you have paid to know. And how do they know if you shared this information? They monitor you. 24/7. Now apply this idea to the internet and that is ACTA.
The idea of having to pay for every piece of information, and not sharing it destroys the basis of modern day life. The internet is an amazing resource in which we share information, which has meant we have achieved huge accomplishments which would not be possible without being able to share our ideas.
If you were to email a news article to a friend without permission, the creators of the article will be informed and can prosecute you. If you upload a video to YouTube of your cat with a song in the background, then you can face five years in an american prison. If someone linked that video on Facebook, then Facebook can be taken offline for sharing copyrighted content.
How will this work?
As essentially all machines are connected to each other, shutting off connections to one machine is extremely difficult. To do this, Internet Service Providers would be forced to block connections to the website domain names. Each machine has a unique IP address, and a domain name is essentially something to make an IP address into a different name, so instead of typing a series of numbers to get google, we can type google.com and get to it. This would mean that as they are just blocking the domains, typing in the IP address will still get you there.
In order to stop it completely, Internet Service Providers will be forced to monitor every single big of data sent to and from your machine. You will essentially being watched when using the internet. Any uploading or downloading of illegal data leads to a prison sentence.
Monitoring all data also will hugely slow down the internet and cost billions. Instead of investing to make our internet connection speeds up to the same level as Japan and other countries, we will essentially be paying to slow it down.
Who exactly OWNS the internet?
No-one can own the internet, and therefore it should not be able to be censored, but the american governments think differently, they feel that they own it.
To understand who owns the internet, you need to understand how the internet works. If you connect a wire between two computers, they can communicate with each other, then essentially you connect all your machines in your house using Wi-Fi and ethernet via your router. Then your router then connects your houses network (LAN) to the worldwide network. The internet is the connection of computers, no-one can own the connection, just the users that use it.
Another view would be that the sites themselves all own a share in the internet, essentially Google owns the biggest share as it is the most popular website, and therefore is the biggest thing on the web, meaning it has majority controlled, followed by facebook who is in second.
Who Opposes SOPA/PIPA and who supports it?
Google, the number one most visited website, who owns YouTube, which itself is third, who’s various other location based domains come in at 13 (India), 19 (Germany), 21 (Hong Kong), 23 (Japan), 24 (UK), 25 (France) and many more… Google is strongly against SOPA, and they essentially have majority control over the internet.
Coming at a close second is Facebook, who is also strongly against SOPA, shortly followed by Yahoo, WikiPedia (who host a blackout in protest of SOPA), Twitter, Amazon, WordPress, Ebay, Paypal and many many more who are hugely against the act.
Anonymous, a group of internet hackers that recently took down Sony’s Playstation Network due to them taking out the “Install other OS” option of PS3 after unfairly suing George Hotz for hacking his PS3, have threatened against SOPA. Anonymous have the ability to hack almost any system, they have even taken down the FBI website in a fight against SOPA and ACTA. Anonymous have not said what they plan on doing if it passes, but I can imagine it leading to all major websites going offline, and essentially destroying the internet as we know it.
WikiPedia launched a blackout, along with Reddit and many others. They went offline in order to show what censorship would be like. There are rumours that if SOPA passes, essentially Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Ebay, Amazon along with over 80,000 small websites would go offline until this was reversed. Any other big websites that remain would probably fall at the hands of Anonymous.
On the other side is essentially the film companies and music production companies, who obviously don’t understand how the internet actually works.
The Protests
There have been a number of internet protests against SOPA. The most famous being the SOPA blackout. On the 18th of January 2012, some major websites went offline to fight SOPA. The biggest being Wikipedia, and the rest of the wikimedia foundation. Other sites included Reddit, ICanHasCheezeburger and Minecraft, as well as 7,000 other smaller websites.
Another protest was directly against domain name provider GoDaddy, who is the number one supplier of web domains in america. GoDaddy showed support for SOPA. A pledge threatened GoDaddy that if they do not change their view on SOPA, thousands of their customers will move to a different provider. GoDaddy changed their view on SOPA, but did still lose over 37,000 domain names despite the boycott being called off.
The MegaUpload story
The website MegaUpload.com came down today, due to it being raided by the FBI, even though the site is based in Hong Kong. What gives the FBI the right to take down a website over seas, due to an american law that may or may not get passed? The fact is those that run MegaUpload in fact never broke any laws. The site enabled users to upload and download content. The site was used for legal content, but some users decided to use it to share movies, films and games. Doing this actually broke the megaupload terms of service, and most of the time they did delete pirated content off the site. MegaUpload essentially can not physically monitor everything that goes on the site, and are being treated as huge criminals, because some abused the use of the website.
In retaliation to the attack, Anonymous have launched an attack on the FBI, RIAA, MPAA, BMI websites. These sites are the main supporters of SOPA and ACTA, as they are essentially the controllers of the music and films industry themselves.
Piracy SUPPORTS the industry
The comment I see most on YouTube is “What song is this?”, I rarely see a video without this comment asked. Imagine the effect that causes, how many thousands of sales they get because someone has put a song in their video. Walking past someone in a street who is listening to a pirated version of a song, can easily inspire you to buy it if you like it.
Now, another strong example of how piracy supported the industry is Minecraft. Without piracy, this would not have been as much of a success story as it has been. Mojang (creators of minecraft) supported people who illegally downloaded their game. The idea is that not many people are going to buy an indie game they haven’t heard of without trying it first. Many people went and illegally downloaded the game, loved it, and paid for it. Even if they did not pay for it, them downloading it and showing their friends would have still made more sales.
The ACTUAL effect on the film companies
People will always find ways of stealing content, just ten years ago people were copying CDs in order to share them. There will never be a way of actually stopping it. For a while, people will simply revert to copied CDs and DVDs, by buying fake copies from markets, which often funds criminal networks… Good going there America…
Another alternative may be a bit of a strange one, but essentially disconnecting a router from the internet and opening up the Wi-Fi can create extended LAN networks, basically creating your own internet for the local area, if these do start popping up, each will grow in size using Wi-Fi repeaters and essentially start merging together. This is essentially creating an internet for a town or city, where one or two computers have copies of films or songs on that can be copied without being monitored. This would be an extreme and is not likely, but small lan networks may start appearing to do this.
These alternatives are essentially worthless anyway, the fact is you can still access the banned websites by typing in the IP address of the website rather than the domain name. Essentially typing a string of numbers rather than www.example.com would bypass it. This would lead to firefox plugins that essentially means, typing for example, thepiratebay.org redirects you to the IP rather than using that domain name.
What effects would this have on the internet
SOPA has already affected you, any MegaUpload users have already seen the affect of SOPA, before it has even been passed. SOPA would mean everything on the internet would be monitored. Imagine logging into facebook, posting a status, and having to wait for someone to actually approve everything you do. Think how this slows down the internet.
Now, if one post linking pirated content, and this could be a link to a YouTube video of a cat, with a commercial song on a radio playing in the background, then Facebook can be sued for millions. The cost of actually monitoring the content and if they are actually sued, then it will not be able to remain open.
This can also be applied to Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Flickr, WordPress or any other website that runs off user created content, they essentially could not afford to monitor everything and will be forced to close… Not just affecting america but affecting everyone.
On top of this, as I previously mentioned, this would hugely slow down the internet. Monitoring traffic would slow every single packet of data down. So say goodbye to decent internet speeds.
Economic Effects
ACTA wont only have huge effects on the internet, it would also change the economy, especially in America, but it could easily spread to other countries. The simple fact is the internet earns more money for the economy than the entertainment industry, meaning they would be sacrificing the internet to try to make some people buy more movies.
As ACTA would mean that sites would have to monitor their content, this would cost too much. Google and Facebook could easily go bust, just in themselves that could have massive effects on the economy. This would probably lead to these sites failing to monitor content and closing down.
Small internet businesses will stop appearing, and the money from them will be going to the already rich media conglomerates. You would essentially be giving more power to the big companies and less to small ones, which would cause huge splits in the economy. You could either be rich or poor, nowhere in the middle.
Most politicians are saying ACTA is there in order to ‘stop thousands of jobs being lost’ due to piracy. This simply does not make sense. To create and distribute a song, how many jobs are actually needed? Hardly any, if they music companies had more money, then they are not going to hire anyone else as they have the staff they need. The same applies to the film industry. On the other hand, how many websites will shut down? How many jobs will be lost through the loss of a website? If Google, Amazon, Facebook, Ebay and Twitter went, think of the amount of staff that will be put out of work. Anyone running a legitimate internet business will struggle to be able to start up. Think of those that will be put out of work.
Stealing from the poor and giving to the rich
ACTA cripples new sites from starting out. Imagine if you were to create a new social networking site, you would need to pay hundreds of people to moderate and approve all the content, or you could easily be taken down and sued by the mega rich film studios or musicians.
The most common meme to come from this, is the fact that if ACTA passes, Justin Bieber should face 5 years in prison. The idea behind this is that when he started, he posted song covers to his YouTube account. This means that these broke copyright laws and he should face prison. But the fact is, no matter how infamous he is to me and you, he has made a huge contribution to the music industry, making a tonne of money for the record labels.
How does this relate to InsideIndie
Our chances of success has been threatened hugely by ACTA already. As said before, imagine the Justin Bieber analogy, imagine we had someone extremely talented that covered a song for us, we can not show it. This person could have become the new internet star that made inside indie huge, but in fact we are facing charges and being sued for hosting this content illegally instead.
Also, imagine us trying to do a game review without being able to show you any footage, it would be impossible to be able to contact the game companies and ask for permission every time we want to do a review. Then essentially the game designers have full rights over our reviews, if we give it a bad one, they have the rights to take it down.
Another fact is that people will not risk making independent films or games any more. The big players in the industry would have complete control over them. Trying to create an indie film, and having to create all the content such as songs yourself costs a lot more. The independent talent will have no chance to become a part of the industry.
And then theres the problem of the content. If one person comments on an article with a link to some pirate content, then essentially were done for.
Film, Music and Gaming can all be either seen as a business, or an art form. Commercial films, music and games are always just for money. Independent is all about this as an art form. We would be destroying our art forms in order for the commercial industries to possibly make a couple more million on the top of the billions they earn already. We need to keep these industries an art form, created by people like you and I. Looking up a picture online of the Mona Lisa is not illegal, we are essentially looking at a copy of a piece of art people pay to look at. If everything else was art, like they make it out to be, why would this matter to them?
America can not censor the web. Our freedom to share knowledge has been sold. If this law passes then we will see a huge change to the web. Web warfare has already begun due to the loss of MegaUpload, if this continues, web users and governments will be fighting for control of the web. We will lose our most popular websites, no Google or Facebook. You can not change how the web works, no-one owns it. It is more powerful than any one group of people. We need to keep the web ours.
Written by Andrew Hargrave
